Alex Vishney.
Alex Vishney, Managing Director, Sydney, 5D.
Ask a Chief Customer Officer and a CMO what their strategies are and you will often get very different answers. Marketing and CX teams have different strategic focuses, with different goals, worldviews and measures of success. In many businesses, customer experience (CX) and brand experience (BX) are treated as entirely separate universes.
The result of this schism is, at best, an inefficient way of developing a singular experience for customers. At worst, it creates a conflict between what your brand promises and what your customers actually experience. Your brand team might be promising innovation and superior service while your CX team is focused on reducing customers’ costs and simplifying interactions.
Consumers don’t separate their lived experience of a product or service from their perception of the brand. It’s a singular mental construct. The same fundamental drivers that shape a consumer’s brand perceptions also define their experience of being a customer of that brand. These drivers include product, value, service, reputation, brand voice and all of the sub-components within these categories. Customers and non-customers both have an internal scorecard on each of these dimensions of your brand, albeit scored using different information and inputs.
For example, a customer’s mental map of your service experience might be rich and detailed, having developed over many years and across many service touchpoints. In contrast, a non-customer won’t have this detail but would still have some perception of quality developed through things like advertising, word of mouth and recommendations. Both would rely on the “service” information they have to evaluate your brand, and both can produce a “score” within their mental scorecard for service.
Extending this to all other drivers (product, price, reputation, and so on), we can create a single business performance framework, in which drivers of brand equity are the same as drivers of customer experience, albeit measured (or “scored”) slightly differently. This framework unifies the brand and CX universes, providing a more powerful whole-of-business strategic planning and evaluation tool. It’s an integrated view of brand and customer experience, one that applies to customers and non-customers alike.
If you have separate CX and brand experience programs and are sceptical of the benefit of a master business performance framework, ask yourself if you can clearly answer what is working and what isn’t working to drive growth at each stage of building a customer relationship.
At a very simple level, how well are your products, price, service and brand working to attract new customers and retain existing customers? Which levers do you need to dial up or down, and where will you get the greatest return on investment?
Measuring all aspects of the business performance together means we can clearly see the relative priorities and encourage the business to work together to deliver a compelling offer and experience.
Consumer decision-making has never been messier. The explosion of digital, the collapse of linear funnels, the impact of AI: they have all created an environment where customers jump between channels, weigh up options in real time and can drop off as quickly as they arrive. In that context, it’s not enough to track awareness at the top of the funnel or satisfaction at the end of a journey because growth depends on winning the active choices customers are making right now, whether they’re new to the brand or 10 years into the relationship.
A single business performance framework is about joining the dots. It identifies the core drivers of both brand choice and customer experience – product, value, accessibility, brand imagery, values, reputation and voice – and applies them consistently. The result is a common language across the organisation, something that reduces wasted spend and gives leadership confidence. Boards, CMOs, COOs, and CX leaders can evaluate performance using the same metrics and business levers, not competing dashboards. When you can see clearly which drivers matter the most, you stop chasing metrics that look good in isolation but don’t actually drive growth.
Combining your CX and brand experience doesn’t mean discarding existing measures. It means putting them under a single framework that reflects how consumers actually experience brands. It’s a framework that reflects how consumers really make choices and how your brand really performs in the moments that matter. There is no CX or BX, there’s just the experience.